Yeah, I'm going a little earlier than that. Doing the Barbary Wars, for which there is no museum, sadly.

Oddly, I've never made time on any of my NOLA visits to check out the WWII museum. Given its stellar reputation and my interests, that seems almost unpossible, but I usually go for my wife's dance competitions and am busy with that during the museum's opening hours.

You are really cranking on the hours in your quest to deny me the lucre I did almost nothing to deserve. I guess you've earned another puppy gif.

Poker Faces in the Crowd: Poker Dicks

https://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/...oker-dicks.php

Yeah I like how she weaves in the gloom with the fairy tale theme.

Had to google Barbary Wars. Ten seconds well spent!

The museum is impressive, and impressively enormous. Went back with my parents last Thanksgiving and it was well worth another visit.

And this is why I'm writing on it. It is a fascinating and precedent setting engagement. Well worth at least 30 seconds of your time, if only more of the interesting stuff was documented and discussed.

Two Books and a Podcast

Some interesting poker content came onto my radar this month, and I wanted to pass it along here. Some of you may recall the psychologist/New Yorker writer Maria Konnikova's journey into the game, under the tutelage of (the GOAT?) Eric Seidel. Well, after spending an extra year or so pondering the luck-skill divide, she's finished her book; you can read an excerpt, "How I Became a Poker Champion in One Year," here.

In addition, 2p2 founder Mason Malmuth wrote The History of the World from a Gambler's Perspective, a unique project that sees significant historical events as "good" or "bad" gambles. I'm hoping that his epilogue "Covid-19: The Nut Low" proves to be edifying.

I haven't yet read either book yet, but I'm excited to do so.

Also wanted to pass along DGAF's interview with Jim Rankin, a long-time rounder, a 2p2er, and, as I like to think of him, a LAG disguised as an OMC. Some great stories from the sixties and seventies, about both poker and life.

The History of the Barbary Wars According to Garick? I'd read that.

June Recap


Our intrepid poker room manager predicts that Harrahdise action will resume six-handed in August or September.

Whatever. I wouldn’t be surprised if I don’t play live until 2021.

Info dump incoming, clearly LOLtldr:

For anyone suffering from post-Last Dance withdrawal, here are two MJ-centric pieces, starting with an ESPN feature story that engages directly with the documentary

The second is a throwback to John Wideman's 1990 Esquire profile "Michael Jordan Leaps the Great Divide." You could argue that Wideman is the MJ or the Lehhbron of the literary world—he's that good—and I might pick up his memoir Hoop Roots at some point, though I've heard it's abstrusely highbrow so I dunno.

I watched OJ: Made in America, and loved every minute. It blows The Last Dance out of the water. You'd be hard-pressed to find a better companion piece to our current racially divisive moment.

Of course, if I were gonna offer up something on race and politics—which I am—James Baldwin's 1968 Esquire interview was republished and it's incredibly timely and relevant.

These days the only thing hipper than quoting Baldwin and flaunting a copy of White Fragility is canceling racists. Did you know that Flannery O’Connor wouldn’t deign to see Baldwin when he visited her hometown of Milledgeville? “About the Negroes,” she wrote in a 1964 letter, “the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent.”

GG Flannery!

Doomscrolling aside, this has been a fine month (days and months, it turns out, are meaningless). I've started going off-grid one day each week, in part because I can and because it’s easier to pay attention to the outside world and to achieve a flow state of "deep reading"—for more on this, check out Ezra Klein’s convo with Nicholas Carr, who wrote a book about what technology is doing to our brains.

Speaking of books, my favorite of the month was James McConkey's To a Distant Island, a fiction-memoir hybrid that focuses on Chekhov’s 1890 journey to Sakhalin Island. I imagine that I’m pretty biased here, enjoying Russian lit + experimental memoirs more than the average grinder, but I highly recommend the book nevertheless.

One year ago I was donking my way to the semifinals of the WSOP Media HU tourney.

Now I'm lucky if my "travels" involve long walks from the couch to the fridge

Operation Deny Garick
[691/1200]

So much good stuff to digest here and interesting threads to check out. I'm embarrassed to say I haven't watched OJ: Made in America yet. Just checked Netflix and Prime and unfortunately it doesn't look like it's available on either (I don't have cable). Some day.

I've been wanting to plan sone kind of off-grid schedule for myself. Will definitely be checking out that link. Have you read Digital Minimalism by our man Cal Newport? A lot of it will be old hat for you, I'm sure, but I thought it was pretty good.

I've just started reading the book. So far, very good, given that she's coming to things as a total outsider. (She wasn't sure how many cards in a deck!)

Here's a link to an interview that a friend tells me is worth listening to. (I haven't done so yet.) https://www.preposterousuniverse.com...gy-and-reason/

Only 80 hours this month? Slowing down, mang.

Re. OJ, I think there's a reddit thread that links to a free version of the doc. It should be Googleable.

I haven't read Digital Minimalism. Good?

Another guy who's been thinking about this stuff for a long time is Sven Birkerts: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/...t-distraction/

Thanks for the link. I've listened to one interview already, and have quickly lost track of all the press she's doing. Good to see that the book is being well represented--and more importantly that it's a worthwhile read!

Gotta give you the illusion of a good sweat, amirite?

An Interview about Mindfulness and Poker Faces in the Crowd: The Bosnian Bomber

I interviewed Jason Su about his new book Poker with Presence: Unlocking the Final 15%. Topics include writing, managing emotion, tennis, Tommy Angelo, and cultivating mindfulness in both poker and life. I was familiar with Jason through one of his old PGCs, so I was happy to dip into this topic, and I'm glad that I did. He has a newish PGC here, and it's worth a follow.

For a story about basketball, violence, and strange coincidences, here's my monthly 2p2 piece Poker Faces in the Crowd: The Bosnian Bomber.

Any Two Lou (1925-2020)

A while back I interviewed Lou Marziale, a Nola native who’s been gambling way longer than most of us have been alive. He passed away this month, a few days before his 95th birthday.

I met Lou in the white chip game, although it took me a while to get there. Cardrooms remind me of high-school cafeterias: you sit with your buddies, give each other ****, and imagine what life’s like at other tables—among the jocks, or the nerds, or the musicians, or the cheerleaders—without ever really glimpsing what’s going on. From the outside, the white chip game appeared to be a special sort of hell for retired geezers. Every day around noon, the same shabby regulars shuffled to their cardtable like mummies, sitting very close together in a little circle facing one another. As they waited for another hand, they sluggishly sipped coffee and munched Lucky Dogs and gazed mournfully at the neon JACKPOT sign that flashed its six-figure payout—a mocking reminder that somehow, against all odds, you might get lucky.

A year passed before it crossed my mind that these people might be worth meeting, or even that they were people at all, rather than insubstantial ghosts. Eventually I started playing a few times a week or a month, a Saturday afternoon here, a Monday evening there. One day I sat next to a gnarled oldster who looked exactly like Miracle Max from The Princess Bride. Wild white hair sprouted from the sides of his bald head. His blue eyes were sleepy, roofed by fluffy white eyebrows, and he had a thick ogre’s nose. “I have about 300 of these shirts,” Lou said, after I complimented his baggy black button-down. “And I only paid $2.99 for them. When I used to manage a department store, I had a connection.” He turned and faced me, and I could see that he also had a wispy white mustache. “Lee Harvey Oswald worked for me,” he added, “and I fired him. He was seventeen years old.”

“Why’d you fire him?” I asked.

But now Lou’s attention was back on his cards. He announced a raise, pushing forward sixteen white chips, and his opponent, Big Mike, reluctantly called. Lou showed eight-three offsuit for a rivered two pair, and just like that a tattooed bruiser was reduced to a crybaby. “That’s just two terrible cards,” Mike complained, shaking his head. “I don’t know why you’re playing those, man. They’re not even suited.”

“Let me explain something to you,” Lou said. His voice was mild and matter-of-fact. “You’ve never thought of this, but it’s very simple.”

“Ah, I’m just messing with you,” Mike said.

Lou gently raised his right hand, palm out, to show that he took no offense. “Six people at the table are betting. That means they’ve got big cards.” He lowered his voice and his eyes glimmered. “I take the trash.”

After he finished stacking his chips, Lou told me that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t worth a ****. “Here’s what happened,” he said. “We were at the Dolly Shoe Store in 1955. The floor was packed with customers. The salesmen would show the shoes—eighteen dollar ladies’ dress shoes—and leave the ones that they didn’t sell on the floor. Oswald’s job was to pick ’em up. All of a sudden he disappeared, off to eat. He was gone thirty or forty minutes. When he came back, I fired him.”

“Just like that?”

“Yeah. I didn’t fool around.”

Whenever Lou was in the white chip game, which he often was, you might hear about the Great Depression, or the second World War, or Carlos Marcello, or the furniture business, or the time when Lee Harvey Oswald got the boot. On the days when he stared blankly into space for hours and then shuffled off to the craps tables, you might hear nothing at all. He had a remarkable, if meandering, memory and a fondness for dates, streets, names, birthdays. Once Lou was telling me about a girl he took to Washington Square Park, an Italian beauty with long black hair. He couldn't remember her name: his brain, he said, was slowing down. An hour passed, mostly in silence. Then Lou cried out and grabbed my arm. “Selita!” He said, spelling out the name. “S-E-L-I-T-A.”

“She must have been a memorable girl,” I said.

“She was beautiful,” he said. He closed his eyes, and his fluffy eyebrows quivered. “Beautiful.”

I feel obligated to mention that by any standard, even by the low bar set by the hordes of drunken tourists who stampeded into the casino, Lou was an atrocious poker player. Even so, part of me admired his philosophy: Life’s short, especially if you’re ninety-four, so why waste time folding? Get busy living, or get busy dying. After running out of chips, he reached into his wallet and tossed a wrinkled hundo onto the purple baize—over and over and over and over and over, more times than anyone could count, so that when he nonchalantly mentioned he’d lost two-and-a-half million dollars, that staggering figure seemed not only possible, but inevitable. “I’m a big loser. Big loser,” he explained matter-of-factly, as though he was discussing the weather. “I’ve been in here a lot since Hurricane Katrina. If I didn’t have cards, I’d be out of my mind.”

The last time I visited the white chippers was on a weekday afternoon in January. I knew everyone. There was Tim, and Brigid, and Eeyore, and the mousy guy whose wife always sat nearby, reading the latest Danielle Steele. There was Ewald, slouching extravagantly with a Kangol sunhat and a gray sweatsuit and a faded Dracula tattoo snickering on his forearm, so that he looked like a weathered Transylvanian pimp. There was Miss Lucy, a great-grandmother who adores God and gambling, in that order, and who’d recently celebrated her 91st birthday. And there was, of course, Lou, sporting a black Harrahdise windbreaker with only the top button fastened, so that it looked like he was wearing a bib. He asked if I wanted to browse his voluminous book collection.

“When?” I asked.

“I keep losing your number,” he said. “That’s why we need to go now.”

Lou shuffled onto the front drive like a penguin, without the help of a walker or cane. He tipped the valet five bucks and carefully lifted himself into the driver’s seat of his silver Toyota Tacoma. “Watch your knees,” he said, popping open the passenger door. As we pulled onto Convention Center Boulevard, I was more nervous than scared—if we got into an accident, we probably wouldn’t die—but my skepticism appeared to be unwarranted. Lou drove cautiously up Poydras, stopping smoothly at traffic lights and using his blinker to change lanes. “That block, right there, is where my grandmother lived,” he said, pointing to Loyola Avenue. “She buried her money underground, right underneath that trolley. After the recession in ‘29, people didn’t put money in the bank.”

“1953 Poydras,” he said, glancing at a parking lot across from the Superdome. “The house that I was born in, my daddy built. One day he was baking alcohol, and when they raided him, all the alcohol went in the street, and the goats drank it and got drunk.”

“That must have been during Prohibition,” I said.

“It became legal again in ‘35. You know the old hospital on Tulane Avenue?”

“Charity Hospital?”

“Yeah. In ‘36, when I was eleven years old, they let me go inside and pick up pieces of iron off the first floor. I built two wagons, and I had a kid in the neighborhood working for me. Whatever we’d get for the scrap iron, he got half. These days you can’t do that.”

Then there were the meat and hot dog companies, the bed factory, his uncle’s house—with each block, we traversed an almost-forgotten, invisible world. When we turned onto North Broad, he handed me a flip-phone with handwritten numbers taped on the back and asked me to call his daughter, Flora. I dialed her number and handed him the phone, painfully aware that I was enabling a 94-year-old to chitchat while joyriding one-handed smack in the middle of rush hour. Somehow he performed admirably, turning left onto Esplanade and underneath Claiborne. “I drive good for a nine-hundred-and four—” he paused, collected himself— “ninety-four-year-old. I learned how to drive in Germany, in the mountains, during the War. See that big building straight ahead?” It was The Esplanade at City Park, a luxury apartment complex overlooking Bayou St. John. “That’s where we’re going.”

Lou’s two-bedroom apartment, which he shared with Flora and her husband, was on the first floor. It was dimly lit, with Office Depot boxes stacked six high in the hallway. “That’s the small amount of stuff,” he said, leading me into a guest room. More Office Depot boxes, dozens of them, lined the walls. In the middle of the room was an easy chair covered by a white sheet, facing a TV playing a black-and-white Western on mute.

Back in the hallway, I met Flora. She told me about her family, and I told her about the cardroom. “Your dad’s a pretty serious player,” I said.

“Oh, jeez,” she answered, rolling her eyes. I asked if they’d grown up playing cards.

“Never. Daddy likes to play cards. That’s what he enjoys. And he worked hard his whole life to be able to do that, so…” Her voice trailed off, and she looked away.

“He’s a good driver,” I said, changing the subject.

“He is!” She laughed and shook her head. “He actually is.”

After a few more minutes of browsing, Lou wanted to get back the casino. He'd left his chips on the table and didn't want to lose his seat. As we headed out the door, Lou lagged behind and gave Flora an imploring, puppyish glance. “Daddy, I don’t got any money on me,” she said quietly. Then: “You want a twenty? All right.”

We got back in the truck, opened the gate, and waited to make a left onto Esplanade. One car whizzed by, then another. Suddenly Lou stomped on the gas and zoomed out of the exit—straight towards the neutral ground.

We struck the curb head-on and lurched horribly up and over, like a ship cresting a wave. For a moment we sat in stunned silence; Lou wouldn’t stop blinking his bewildered eyes. After a few polite beeps from the cars behind us, he tentatively put the truck back into drive, chuckled sheepishly, and said, “Well, there goes my reputation.”

For about a minute we drove in silence, fifteen miles under the speed limit. I double-checked my seat belt. When I snuck a glance to my left, Lou was staring straight ahead with something like a smile on his face. We started to speed up.

Plot twist at the end! Nicely done. You take any books?

July Recap


I read a few memoirs this month. The first, JR Moehringer's The Tender Bar, is about growing up fatherless and poor in Manhasset, Long Island, the inspiration for East Egg in The Great Gatsby. Moehringer finds solace and plenty of father figures at Dickens, an infamous watering hole a few blocks from his house.

This is an exquisitely written, polished book. The scenes at the bar were, to me, the least interesting, and I enjoyed most of all the descriptions of his family and his college experience at Yale.

I also read Solitary, the story of Albert Woodfox, a Nola native who spent four decades in solitary confinement for a murder he didn't commit.

Woodfox is honest and blunt, and his narrative is strangely gripping. I learned a lot about prison culture. There are about a dozen moments that I recognized from my favorite movie

The book also reminded me of a moment from young Bob's beeball days. One of my AAU coaches (his name was—I **** you not—Dean Smith) worked at Eastern Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in upstate NY. At the time we were looking to scrimmage the best and baddest ballers that we could find. Naturally, Dean set up a game with Eastern's rec league team.

I have no idea how he convinced my parents that it was a good idea for their seventeen-year-old son to compete against some of the most dangerous criminals in the state, but he did. And I certainly wasn't going to say no. When game day arrived, about twelve of us went through security, down a few windowless mazelike hallways, and outside to the rec yard. The open-air court, covered only by an A-frame roof, was on the far side. If you stood at half-court, you could look straight across the yard to the prison's far wall, about a football field away. I remember thinking it was weird that, aside from a guard or two, no one was around. There wasn't a single inmate in the whole yard.

We started to warm up. After ten minutes or so I looked to my left and saw, across the yard, a huge pack of inmates walking toward us wearing orange jumpsuits. There had to be a hundred, at least. As they got closer, I could see that some of them wore only pants with a white tank-top; others were shirtless. Many of them were grotesquely swole after spending years lifting weights all day.

The inmates surrounded the court and began to gleefully heckle us. They heckled their own team, too, and it was clear that they cared more about action than about who would win. They used cigarettes to bet on the outcome of the game. In the layup line, watching my teammates, it was clear that all of us were scared shitless, but we tried not to show it.

Thanks!
Operation Deny Garick
[770/1200]

Poker Faces in the Crowd: Andrew Brokos

This month I spoke with the Thinking Poker Podcast's co-host Andrew Brokos. We discussed his new book Play Optimaler, creative writing, pessimism, and America's future.

Long time, no hear, Bob! Was a pleasure to read this interview with one of my favourite poker thinkers (and subtle moralists). I’m 3/4 through book 2 and appreciating the extended application of the ideas from book 1.

Very pleased to see this thread has continued to trot along.

One less than last month. Hopeful trend for me?

Long time indeed! I hope things are good with you, Dr. I was thinking about you not that long ago, in relation to cardroom anthropology. I don’t think I’ve seen more eloquent writing on the subject than in your old PGCs.

Glad to hear you’re enjoying the new Brokos. I worked through it before I sent him interview questions, and enjoyed the second installment quite a bit. Less theoretical and more applicable than the first book, which made it easier for me to digest.

Yes, trotting along for now. I just saw that one of the GOAT PGCs, Benabadbeat’s, is winding down, which is unfortunate but makes sense. Not as many writing-minded up-and-comers these days.

outlook for the fall: excessive teaching, bloviating, and doomscrolling. In other words, LOL writing...I might be drawing dead!

Yes, finished the second book yesterday. A strength of the Brokos material, compared to say Janda, is the digestibility and applicability (that is, smart heuristics). I suspect this strength is a result of him being both a long-time pro and podcaster: knows how to get the complex message across in a relevant way. The fact that he sets up a model early (the Ace, King, Queen game in Book 1 and the set preflop ranges of the Ivan/Opal in Book 2) ensures there’s a stable narrative thread to which he can attach his game theory principles. I also like the way Brokos defends game theory in general, in a practical sense for live players, against straw-man arguments (such as humans don’t play like bots).


Dubnjoy’s thread seems to be chugging along, too, which is great to see. Would be very pleased if the writerly 2+2 thread re-emerged. I guess the podcast has filled this space, to an extent, but ultimately we’re talking about different forms, so there’s certainly room for both to coexist.

Have you read Janda's second book? It's much more accessible than Applications imo. That said, the Brokos reads to me like an eloquent extension of Janda, so I'm not sure that there's a need to go back.

Yep, Dubn's thread (and his prolific poasting frequency) is inspiring!

I agree with most of what's been said in Bena's thread about the decline of the PGC subforum (and of 2+2 in general). With edges thinning and access to information at a premium, it's not surprising to see micro-communities forming on Discord or RIO or wherever. Collaboration still exists, but it's more siloed. I also think that we're witnessing a decline in longer-form writing that's connected to a growing attention deficit, prioritizing "shallow" over "deep" work, etc. Twitter has become our God.

I did read around Janda’s second book (i.e. followed the thread), but never dipped in, due to the perceived time commitment. I’ve much respect for his work (and Tipton), since they conceived their ideas and wrote prior to the solver revolution, after which theory effectively became practice, for some.

I believe part of the decline of the PG&C has to do with the value that can be obtained from forming communities in more gated online environments, where some form of paywall can be enforced. It’s a shame that our data has been so commodified in this respect, but kind of inevitable. At least this system discourages trolling, I guess.

Some long form writing is still alive (encyclopedic novels are still being written and read, such as Ducks, Newburyport). Many of the long 19th century novels were published in instalments, as you know. Of course, the instalments were a little bit longer than a tweet, I’ll admit. One has to have some faith in the older forms!

Wait a minute. You haven't gotten an invite to my Discord group Bob's Bombastic Beeballers? Only $39.95 per month (not including admin fees). PM me for details.
One encouraging sign is how well the book industry is doing during this pandemic. It doesn't seem to be affected much if at all. I think that there will always be a demand for longform storytelling (and hopefully longform writing).

Musings of a Lapsed Vegas Scribbler, Part I

A friend recently tagged me in a photo from last summer, marking the one-year anniversary of Sugar Kay’s epic NBA title run. A bunch of us had watched Game 6 at Beerhaus, an open-air pub near MGM Grand. The photo got me thinking about five years (mostly) well spent covering and occasionally playing in the WSOP. It’s unlikely that I’ll be doing that sort of work again—although I hope to continue degenning in Vegas for many years to come—but I’m glad I was able to glimpse the world’s biggest poker tournament series from the inside.

I remember the first time I saw a live reporter frantically jotting in his notebook and then scurrying back to his laptop in the corner of Amazon’s bustling ballroom. He reminded me of a Wimbledon ballboy: focused, eager, and a bit flustered. I knew that these reporters were responsible for the live updates on WSOP.com, the only place where you can get a vague sense, in real time, of how a tournament’s going. What they were actually doing, I didn’t know.

At the time, back in the summer of 2015, I was also a member of the media. Technically. The WSOP isn’t quite as discriminating as, say, the White House Press Corp, so I was able to snag a badge rather easily. I arrived in Vegas at the beginning of June with little idea of what to expect or what to do. Mostly I wanted to see the action for myself, to measure ESPN’s coverage of the WSOP with my first-hand experience of it. I had, of course, religiously watched the TV final table each year. I’d also read the best accounts of the Rio-era WSOP—Jim McManus, Martin Amis, Anthony Holden, Colson Whitehead, all of them literary heavyweights who weighed in with impish panache. “My nostrils flare to the elegant scene,” Amis thinks after stepping inside the Amazon on Day 1 of the Main. “It is like the dining room of an ocean liner after an invasion by unusually pitiless pirates.”

It was a few weeks into the WSOP when, like Amis, I strolled inside Amazon. Aside from the incessant chip-rustling, the vibe there was almost librarial; this was no pirate-infested party. Each of the room’s color-coded quadrants contained a different donkament: in Tan, the early stages of a $1,500 NLH event; in Purple, the late stages of $5,000 Razz; in Gold, another hold ‘em event. Still another event, a $3,000 LOLimit hold 'em, was wrapping up in the Thunderdome. Rob, the WSOP’s Director of Live Reporting, was sitting by himself in the stands, grimacing and typing furiously on a laptop perched precariously atop his lap. Like me, he was a lit nerd who'd studied modernism (especially James Joyce) before he discovered poker. After a few minutes he slammed shut his laptop, zoomed out of the stands, and, upon seeing me, jerked to a halt. The summer, he told me, was going terribly. Pokernews hadn’t been able to reach an agreement with Caesar’s and so, for the first time, the WSOP had hired an in-house team of live reporters. The coverage was suffering in the hands of these untested newbs, and he had to clean up the shoddy work himself, shadow-editing or writing from scratch hundreds of hand histories at a breakneck speed. The sixteen-hour days were taking a toll: to me, Rob resembled one of Joyce’s beleaguered sidewalk-dwellers in Dubliners.

“Gotta go,” he said, frowning at a message on his phone.

As Rob speedwalked away, I made a mental note to avoid live reporting. It seemed like a tedious, thankless job, filled with rote observations and little room for creativity. I preferred to have long, meandering conversations over coffee or lunch, and I used my interest in workaday grinders as an excuse to explore the Strip. At the Aria, I met a guitar-playing artist who split his time busking and playing low-limit cash. At the Venetian, I met a retired road gambler who’d bankrolled the infamous MIT cardcounting crew; now he was a cash game crusher whose player's card was programmed to display BIG FISH in Bravo's system. At the Bellagio, I met a Hawaiian surfer-turned-grinder. At Yard House, I met a fearless wizkid who routinely battled GEEMAN at the Commerce. These folks appeared to be less concerned with fame or money than with chiseling out their version of the good life. Others seemed hungry for the limelight, but only if they could craft their own stories. One afternoon at the Rio Starbucks, I met OG Vegas Vlogger Tim “TheTrooper97” Watts. The content of his vlogs—long drives around town, endless cups of Starbucks coffee, strolls through casinos and parking decks and poker rooms—seemed to me both mindnumbingly boring and strangely compelling. They captured the messy reality of cardplaying in a way that a tidy three-minute ESPN profile never could. “On the surface,” Tim said, sitting across from me with a flat-brimmed black hat that shouted VILLAIN, “what you’ll see is ‘Guy moves to Vegas, here’s his daily progress.’ But if you look deeper, what you’ll see is that I don’t want to be a waiter in Jacksonville, Florida. Period. Ever. I did that **** for too long, so I’m leaving to go do what I want to do. Which happens to be using my poker skills as a vehicle to get somewhere. And I’m still not sure where I want to go, but it involves developing a more well-rounded life, and creating **** that people get a thrill from. I love that I’m the only person doing what I’m doing on YouTube. And if you want to go spend 20 ****ing hours a week editing to keep up with me, go right ahead.”



In early July, I finally had the chance to put my media badge to good use. The Main was here. Compared to my mid-summer wanderings, the vibe inside the Rio’s poker wing was electric. The pitiless pirates had arrived in droves, overwhelming Pavilion, Brasilia, and Amazon. I spent most of Day 1B following a few Nola locals. The Blaster, a retired entrepreneur with a serious case of pokeritis, was on Table 87 in Brasilia, stone-faced behind silver mirror shades and a white Corvette hat. During the first break he jogged over to me on the rail, relieved, I think, to spot a familiar face. He was agitated, sleep-deprived, and nervous— “extremely nervous,” he said. “I’m telling you, Bob, I was sitting at the table for an hour-and-a-half just focusing on my breath. That’s all I could do.”

“How’s your table?” I asked.

“I feel like everybody’s playing ABC poker. I’ve only got one aggro. Unfortunately he’s to my left. I’ve noticed people are a lot more serious. This is unlike any other tournament I’ve ever played: everyone’s dead serious.”

With little time to spare, The Blaster joined the horde of stampeding grinders who were jockeying for the privilege to piss. I checked my phone and saw a DM from Wild Bill. Trucker Kenny is from New Orleans also in the same room as Blaster and right on a rail. Right side of the room too but opposite corner. He’s got a GCP patch on.

I found Bill as advertised, on the other side of Brasilia, watching a guy wearing a gray horseshoe mustache, a white button-down, and an MT TRUCK SERVICE hat. Whenever Trucker Kenny folded a hand, he joined Bill on the rail like a boxer conferring with his cornerman. Kenny, like The Blaster, had qualified for the Main by shipping a satty back home. Bill was also playing for free, as part of an investors group called Monkey’s Minions. The outrageous story of the Minions deserves its own poast (or book). All I’ll say for now is that it’s a staking group whose ringleader, Will “Monkey” Souther, hand-picks a group of southern semipros—his “Minions”—to enter the Main. In addition to joining them for a second straight year, Bill was the co-founder of Gulf Coast Poker, a website that covered action across the South.

For the next week, I played the role of a glorified fanboy. After witnessing my first bubble boy elimination—a scenario that engenders more schadenfreude than I thought possible—I spent most of Day 4 wandering between ballrooms and snapping photos of surviving Gulf Coasters for Bill’s website. Early on Day 5, with about 600 remaining players clustered around tables inside Amazon, GOAT (or is it WOAT?) commentator Norman Chad paced the room with a notebook, collecting material for the upcoming ESPN telecast. He noticed a guy in an MT TRUCK SERVICE hat. Every time the guy left his seat, other players, dealers, floormen, and railbirds wished him well. Puzzled, Chad walked over. “Excuse me,” he said. “Everyone here knows you. Who are you?”

Trucker Kenny smiled and said, “I’m the best-known unknown player in the country.”

Wild Bill was also alive. I ping-ponged between Amazon Gold and Tan, supplying them with updates and providing recon on their tables. They ended up busting a few spots from each other, Bill in 223rd place, Kenny in 218th. Friends for over a decade, outlasting most of the 6,420 entrants, cashing for $40,433—there was no question that their deep run was special, and you could see the satisfaction on their faces.

As I headed home, my own impressions of the summer were closer to The Blaster’s: exciting, but incomplete. He’d been eliminated by the online crusher Chris Moorman midway through Day 2. They’d tangled for most of the day and, in hindsight, The Blaster admitted that he shouldn’t have targeted such an experienced player. But, he said, he would use his bustout as a lesson, a learning experience. He'd be back, new and improved, for the next WSOP. I hoped that I could say the same.

Vegas Scribbling, Part 2

After my first WSOP, I drove home. I was back in New Orleans by August, that time of year when the city marinates in mugginess like a waterlogged hippo. Action in the cardroom was slow. Months passed, and I found myself marking time by the Gulf Coast’s unofficial poker calendar: in September, The Gulf Coast Poker Championship at the Beau Rivage; in the fall, weekend festivals and Saints Sundays; in January, the Beau’s Million Dollar Heater; in February, Mardi Gras. March Madness and the Nola Circuit Event were around the corner, but I still hadn’t given much thought to my summer plans. Then I received an email from Rob inviting me to join the 2016 WSOP Live Reporting team. “The hours are long,” he said, “and over the course of the Series it can be a little exhausting. But people who enjoy poker almost universally say they enjoy it—the hours pass quickly, it’s a lot of fun, and you get to watch more poker than you ever have before. And you really are in the heart of action for the world’s biggest poker festival.”

I considered options. I still didn’t want to be a live reporter, but part of me, worker-bee Bob, was ready to grind, to learn about how the WSOP looked from the inside. At the same time, one summer at the Rio was enough to know I’d be miserable if I covered donkaments for seven full weeks. In the end, I settled on a kind of middle ground: I would work the first three weeks of the WSOP and take a break—for a camping trip, or to visit my parents, or just to escape the city—and then I’d return for the Main Event.

I flew to Vegas at the end of May, checked in at the Rio, and headed to orientation in the morning. Four long tables faced a whiteboard inside the Palma Room, the WSOP’s media headquarters. About twenty of us trickled inside, taking out notebooks like first-semester freshmen. After a round of introductions Rob and Jess, a droll, whipsmart industry veteran, taught us the three Golden Rules of live reporting. Rule One: ABC—Always Be Counting. Chips, Jess explained, tell the story of a poker tournament. Follow the chips, and you’ll spot the story. A tournament’s early stages is a reconnaissance mission: you need to scout out your assigned section by identifying chip leaders and well-known players—Notables—and posting their stacks into a digital system called CMS. Once a player’s stack is live on WSOP.com, you have to diligently monitor their progress; stale chip counts, after all, is a form of misinformation.

Rule Two: Avoid writing yourself into the coverage. “Remember, this isn’t about you,” Rob said. “It’s about the players, the cards, the chips, the tournament, and occasionally the dealers and floor staff.” I made a mental note to summon my inner Hunter S. Thompson next summer.

Rule Three: Be Objective. Live reporting isn’t about guesswork or mind reading or magically intuiting why some guy punted off his stack. It’s about accuracy, concision, clarity: knowing the suit and rank of each card on the flop; approximating stack sizes; spelling names correctly; and plenty of other tiny, crucial details that come easier with practice.

We spent the rest of the day writing up hand histories, tooling around on CMS, and bonding over team dinner. I met a fresh-faced English journalist straight out of uni, a community college prof from California, and a burly graybeard from Seattle who proudly told us that his article “Why You’ll Never Make a Living Playing Live Tournaments” had appeared in Deadspin (Why can’t you make a living? Variance, of course). There were also a few burned-out poker pros who craved variance-free income. We were a motley assortment of freelancing misfits, united through poker. By not quite fitting in, I fit in.

The next morning, we gathered to report on the first of 68 donkaments, the $1,500 Casino Employees Event. It was a low-stakes endeavor, journalistically-speaking, as the entrants were mostly members of the service industry who would have more sympathy for our mistakes than the average entitled grinder. The first real test was The Colossus. As a gargantuan herd of wannabe-millionaires lumbered into the Rio’s poker wing, generating 21,613 entrants and almost an $11 million dollar prize pool, the event’s enormity floored me. How was it possible to cover even a sliver of the action?

It’s not. As another veteran reporter, Mickey, taught me: Pragmatism, not perfectionism, is the way to go. In a tournament’s early stages, you’ll ideally post a few entertaining updates involving cooler hands or amusing banter—catnip for the WSOP’s starry-eyed fans—while also identifying Notables. These are the game’s big kahunas, legends like Phil Ivey and Main Event champs like Joe Hachem and A-list celebs like Jason Alexander. Failing to mention one of these guys would be a major oversight. But “Notable” is a vague label, perhaps intentionally so, and less notable Notables fly under the radar all the time. A WSOP bracelet is surely enough to make you Notable-worthy. But what about a Circuit Event ring? Is that enough? What if you have lots of live cashes but no WSOP jewelry? What if you’re an online crusher like Jungleman or Elky? Some tourneys are jam-packed with Notables; others are filled with Nobodies. “Let’s take a walk,” Jess told me one afternoon. We were in Amazon Gold, covering the middle stages of Event #14: $1,500 Millionaire Maker, and a few hundred players remained. I followed her around the roped-off quadrant, jotting down names in my notebook as she casually rattled off one Notable after another. “Bracelet winner,” she said, nodding at Jason Dewitt. “Lots of WSOP cashes,” she said, nodding at Simon Deadman. To me, a fledgling gumshoe, these guys were indistinguishable from the hundreds of other chip-shuffling hoodied-up grinders who filled the room. Thanks to thousands of hours of experience, Jess had accumulated an impressive mental catalog of players, one that came in handy exactly in moments like this.

Despite big numbers, the earliest stages of tournaments are the easiest to cover. Middle-to-late stages, on the other hand, can be a nightmare. Bustouts are fast and furious, making it tough or impossible to accurately follow the action. The roughest stretch is the final-three-tables redraw, when 27 players play down to 9. Mistakes are inevitable. Once I wrote up an elimination post in which the guy who I thought busted was actually still in the tournament. The eliminated player, reading about his mistaken identity on the live updates, promptly shame-tweeted the WSOP. @WSOP I guess all asians look alike? Within minutes, shadow editors informed me of my egregious error over Slack and I hastily revised the post. Now I could add “unwitting racist” to my bio.

After the craziness of the late stages, reporting on the final table is relatively easy. Hand-for-hand coverage usually proceeds at a snail’s pace, especially in our era of excessive tanking. The downside is that these long, drawn out bubbles can create lengthy workdays. When I witnessed Tony Dunst win his first bracelet, it was after 1 in the morning—and that was before we got started on the winner’s recap post. That night I got back to my room around four. It didn’t take long to realize I’d opted into Groundhog Day Part II: The Rio Strikes Back, where each day involved ping-ponging from the workstation to the gaming floor, collecting hand histories, counting stacks, refreshing chip counts, DMing photographers, writing updates, dodging waitresses and dealers and floormen and tilted busto grinders, studying faces, waiting for action, searching for an uncrowded bathroom, counting stacks, refreshing chip counts, trawling Twitter, scarfing down dinner in the employee cafeteria, ignoring phone charger salesmen, posting updates, counting stacks, refreshing chip counts. We usually wrapped up between midnight and 2.a.m., at which point I staggered upstairs and collapsed into bed, asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. Then I was up around nine, hustling down to the Rio’s tiny fitness center where I snagged a treadmill for a short jog while listening, on repeat, to Meat Loaf’s “Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire.” I went back upstairs for a shower, got dressed, grabbed my media badge, stopped at the Rio Starbucks for coffee—my fuel—and headed to one of the ballrooms. I was immersed inside the first-to-arrive, last-to-leave mindset of corporate culture, where work isn’t only an activity but also a panoptic performance. “Reminder to everyone,” Rob emailed us. “If you’re working an event, you should always have Slack open. Literally always. If you’re working, and Slack shows you’re offline, you’re doing it wrong.”

Part of me took a perverse pleasure in feeling exhausted. After all, I had an escape chute: three glorious weeks of R&R before the Main. When mid-June arrived, I fled the Rio and spent two days on the Strip, lounging at the Bellagio and playing poker. Then I flew to San Francisco, where a friend and I drove hundreds of miles along Route 1, camping and hiking our way up the coast until we veered inland and explored Crater Lake.



After a week in Tucson, I returned to Vegas in early July. Nothing had changed. Val and Sean and Simkha and Dave and Will—no longer anonymous reporters, but friends—were still scurrying around Pavilion, notebooks in hands, doggedly covering donkaments. Some of them looked more like zombies than reporters. “So a lot of the people on the team are sick,” Mickey told us over Slack. “Considering you can barely walk from table to table without hearing somebody cough or sneeze, this isn’t surprising. In an attempt to keep people relatively healthy the rest of the way, consider this a general call to arms. If you aren’t sick, we need you to work.” It felt good to rejoin the fray, like a reinforcement propping up my ailing comrades. By this late date, it was firmly established that this was the Year of Fedor. In mere months the German wunderkind had gone from a respected online crusher to a legend, a Notable’s Notable.

My biggest test came when I was assigned to solo coverage of Day 1C of the Little One for One Drop. I set up in the corner of Pavilion White beside the stage, mentally preparing myself for the last event of the summer. A few minutes before one, Mickey stopped by to give me a pep talk. The reporter assigned to Day 1B of One Drop resented that he’d been forced to cover such a large tournament alone. It felt to him like a no-win situation, an impossible task, and his pessimism caused a self-fulfilling prophecy: the coverage was a disaster. Mickey didn’t want me to make the same mistake. “There’s absolutely nothing to stress over,” he told me. “This is a tournament running opposite the Main. In the overall picture, it doesn’t really matter. You’re on it alone because I believe you’re capable of getting through the day without a hitch. There’s no quota of hands to post per level. Just do a fine job and don’t stress out.”

He wished me well and hurried back to Amazon, where the lion’s share of reporters were covering the Main. Staring at dozens of empty tables soon to be filled with hundreds of players, the enormity of the task sank in. I was by myself. There was no way to cover everything. I started scouting the room, reminding myself every few minutes or so: Don’t stress out.

Today marks the final chance for players to enter a bracelet event at this year's World Series. The final flight of Event #69, $1,000 + $111 Little One for One Drop No-Limit Hold'em, gets underway at 3 p.m., with late registration open until the start of Level 7 this evening. The Little One for One Drop costs $1,111 to enter, and there are unlimited re-entries.

After an introductory post, I looped back around Pavilion White, noting players I recognized by sight—an easier task now, thanks to a few hundred hours of practice—and combining them with names that my shadow editor fed me over Slack.

Bracelet winners Men Nguyen, Vitaly Lunkin, John Gale, Andy Frankenberger, Benny Chen, Arkady Tsinis, and Marcel Vonk are among the notable players in the Little One for One Drop. Other familiar faces in the field include Jeff Gross, Allen Kessler, and November Niners Dennis Phillips, John Dolan, and Ylon Schwartz.

I averaged a few posts per hour. I reminded myself to tread water, stay solid, don’t stress. Level 1 passed smoothly, and then Level 2. Just before six, Deenegs strolled self-importantly into the room, taking his seat two tables over from Phil Hellmuth. Thanks to some Twitter sleuthing, I was expecting Kid Poker, and I wrote up a quick post announcing his arrival. At one point he trotted across the room holding two bricks of cash (why wouldn't he have spare bricks on hand?) and said, pointing to Hellmuth, “Get chips from that guy. Just go all in and he’ll fold!”

“I’m hitting every hand,” Hellmuth replied. He was wearing a long-sleeved black shirt and a black hat with yellow Aria lettering. “I have about 40,000.”

“Better than him,” Deenegs said, pointing at a short-stacked Joe Vespo. Gently swatting Vespo’s back with his cash, he added, “C’mon horsey! Go!” Then he scampered back to his table.

For the next few hours, Deenegs and Hellmuth were a study in contrasts. The former was easy-going and amiable. The latter consistently cursed and berated his tablemates. Shortly after midnight, while I was in front of my laptop, I heard a roar and scattered laughter at the far corner of White—Hellmuth’s table. He sprang out of his seat, cursing and screaming, and blustered outside the rail. Muttering to himself as he rage-walked towards the stage, he kicked open one of the double doors and disappeared inside an employee entrance. Players got up from their seats, gleefully waving buh-bye and applauding. His tablemates waved me over and ensured that I got the full HH.

Phil Hellmuth Eliminated by Alex Masek

Alex Masek raises to 1,800 from early position, Phil Hellmuth reraises to 6,300 in middle position, and the blinds fold. Masek shoves all in for about 28,000 and Hellmuth calls. Masek’s AcKc is trailing Hellmuth’s two kings, but the QcJc4d gives the 9-time WSOP Circuit ring winner a royal flush draw. The 9d comes on the turn, and the 4c gives Masek a flush that knocks Hellmuth out of the tournament.

Alex Masek - 62,000
Phil Hellmuth - Eliminated

The One Drop finished around two. I DMed the photographers the chip leaders' seat assignments and got to work on an end-of-day recap. Just before three, I was done. The day had flown by without any major mishaps, and I'd been gifted a Hellmuthian blowup to boot. Mickey was right: there hadn’t been any reason to panic. That night, just before my head hit the pillow, I realized that I had survived my second WSOP.

Great write-up Ben, a really enjoyable read The grind seen from the inside

Counting players chip stacks and recording intimate details of hand histories—without commenting upon strategy—is grand testament to your discipline and professionalism! I’m sure you must have been tempted, via multi-voicing techniques learnt at college, etc., to have used a little of bit irony to shed light on the EV of a few of the hands you witnessed.